We've always had a soft spot for New Zealand's incredibly fertile underground rock scene, and the glorious noises it produces, these days it's outfits like the Dead C, Birchville Cat Motel, Antony Milton, 1/3 Octave Band, Sandoz Lab Technicians, Brothers Of The Occult Sisterhood, Lamp Of The Universe, Lugosi, Lovely Midget, Dean Roberts, Pumice, Omit, but a few years back, it was a whole different scene, well okay, except for the Dead C maybe, but there was a hugely thriving scene and even back then we couldn't get enough. All those bands who sewed the seeds, the bands that paved the way for the groups who make us cd-r crazy today. Folks like Alastair Galbraith Trash, Gate, Golden, Tall Dwarfs, Bill Direen, David Kilgour, Cakekitchen, The Clean, Dadamah, Dissolve, King Loser, Space Dust and of course the legendary Roy Montgomery. Montgomery did time in the groups Dadamah and Dissolve, both of whom were amazing, but it's when he struck out on his own, just him and his guitar, some delay, maybe a little reverb, that's when we really fell in love.
Inroads collects all sorts of singles, and compilation tracks, as well as a handful of unreleased songs, and reminds us just why we loved Montgomery, and how much we've been missing his blissed out solo guitar space rock. And that's exactly what this is, space rock, not so much rock as space, every single track is totally mesmerizing, multitracked reverb drenched nirvana, some super spare and simple, drifting and abstract, others tangled and dense, thick and aggressive. His sound is so unique, so totally singular, the second we pushed play on this, even though most of us hadn't heard him in years, we would have known immediately who it was.
Which speaks volumes about a record of mostly JUST guitar. How expressive and emotive and deeply personal Montgomery's guitar playing really is. Lyrical and melodic, even at its spaciest. All of the obvious adjectives apply here, shimmering, glistening, sparkling, but Montgomery doesn't just make sounds, letting his guitar drone and drift, these are songs, riffs, beautiful and memorable and catchy, dark and spacey and dreamy, complex fingerpicking, simple strumming, subtle shadings of tone and timbre, it doesn't matter what he does or how he does it, it always sounds like him. And it always sounds divine.
Weird name. Weird band. Cool band! First thing to note: this is from the same folks who brought us Ufomammut's Lucifer Songs. In fact, Supernatural Cat is Ufomammut's label. And yes, as we were hoping, MoRkObOt are another HEAVY, spaced-out band of freaky Italians. But while Ufomammut sound like Electric Wizard playing Hawkwind songs, these guys exhibit a more precise -and- alien sounding technique in their all-instrumental compositions, which are definitely very heavy and DISTORTED a la Ufomammut. It's as if Ufomammut built a spaceship, took off from Earth, went up into outer space, and found these guys already there, orbiting some far off galaxy in a blinking robot vessel!!
The MoRkObOt trio -- Lin on bass and synth, Lan on bass, and Len on drums -- obviously have a lot of the same influences as Ufomammut, including the aforementioned Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, and Godflesh... with the latter influence maybe more prominent here, though this isn't all darkly depressive, instead it's sometimes almost energetically happy, like these guys have been popping pills they bought in a shady spaceport cantina. Some tracks are all about repetitive rhythmic pummel... or jaunty, twisting riffery... others feature passages of ominous synthy ambient drone and disturbing sound FX... it's all very psychedelic and sci-fi sounding, like a band jamming around the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. By the time you've experienced the last track, the 23+ minute "Poldon", you're waaaay out in space, maybe never to return... We pretty sure that this will appeal to fans of Titan and Zombi and Circle, and of course the other bands mentioned above!
Another thing to note: these REALLY swank and elaborate, hand-printed, hand-assembled packages (for the cd and the 10" both, they're equally cool lookin', and come in various random colors) are LIMITED. The cd contains a 500 numbered copies of the cd, 500 numbered copies of the vinyl (which, by the way, contains a much shorter version of "Poldon" than the cd does). Both formats feature a wire-bound booklet featuring cool artwork for each track, Voivod-style! Ufomammut's "Malleus Art Lab" is responsible for all the far out art, design, and execution.
We have long been huge fans of New Zealand noisemaker Nigel Wright ever since we first heard him on a cd-r way back in 2005. Since then we've tried to carry everything we could get our hands on, but unlike his overproductive countrymen, it hasn't been much. We flipped over the recent Tapir 3"cd-r and only just recently got a handful of this disc.
Nest is a duo, featuring Wright and LA based sound maker Andrew Scott, and for this little 3" the two have teamed up with Mark Sadgrove (of MHFS and Infintesimal) and together these three kick up quite a din, huge distorted washes of sound that shift and pulse and twist and throb like something alive. Burning white hot and blown out, it's a glistening wall of supernova guitars, wreathed in a hazy cloud of dense distortion and buzzy reverb. Like a single shard of My Bloody Valentine psychrock blowout, looped and run through a busted up old distortion pedal. A gloriously crumbling, coruscating blast of face melting psychedelic free noise bliss.
Already out of print. We have about 25 copies, but these will probably go quick...
Holy shit! Is this fucking cool, or what? First of all, it's got a fucking piece of tile mounted to the cover. Second of all, it's limited to a mere 276 copies. Thirdly, some of the copies we got enjoy a delightful bouquet from the industrial strength adhesive used to bind the tile to cardboard sleeve, that may give an additionally psychoactive property to the album. And fourthly it's another brilliant collaboration between our favorite Scandinavian sound artists BJ Nilsen (from Sweden) and Stilluppsteypa (from Iceland), who had blown us away on their previous duets Vikinga Brennivin and Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna.
We're not really sure who Milan Sandbleistift is, but he's authored the other side of this split LP. His contribution is a teethgrinding piece of dirty drone wandering from lonely 8-bit electronic tones like a random piece of gear yanked from one of the Wolf Eyes' suitcases and allowed to growl in futility amidst a cloud of hiss and crackle pushed towards a radioactive self-immolation. It's pretty fucking cool, but even better is the glacial, grim drones from BJ Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa. They've long mastered a twisted, rumbling ambience that's dark and dense, mysterious and haunting, deep and rich, that always straddles the precision of laptop jockeys like Fennesz, Tim Hecker, Stefan Mathieu, etc. and the blackened atmospheres of Corrupted, Earth, SUNNO))), etc.; and their two sprawling tracks on this split LP are marvelous additions to their catalogues of drones that drift across the Arctic Sea on a massive rusted ship between Sweden and Iceland.
STRICTLY LIMITED to 276 copies of which we only got a handful. So once these are gone, they're gone forever.
Nonhorse is the work of one Gabriel Lucas Crane who spends his day job rocking in the group Wooden Wand & The Vanishing Voice, but when he's on his own, it's a whole 'nother sonic ball of wax. Ot maybe ball of old busted cassettes would be more like it.
Each track, always clocking in at either 3:12, 3:13. or 3:14, is a dense assemblage of random sonic detritus, fuzzy indistinct song fragments, manipulated tape drop outs, ringing phones, sound effects, huge swaths of buzzing distortion, looped bits of detuned guitar, slabs of damaged percussion, the sounds of tapes rewinding and fast forwarding, abstract guitar shimmer looped and slowed down, snippets of classical music, crackle and static, everything murky and indistinct, blurry and smeared into strange cross-eyed soundscapes. It's a bit like John Oswald for the ADD set, but when the mania subsides just a little, and sounds are allowed to shimmer and fade, the sound becomes remarkably beautiful, like Dialing In, all blown out and gorgeously crumbling to bits before our ears, or like a more corrosive lo-fi version of our favorite soundscapers, Jasper TX, Tim Hecker, Machinefabriek, Philip Jeck, the same sort of milk eyed warble and disembodied drift, but assembled from a pile of junkyard tapes. A seriously drug addled mashup of light and dark, pretty and ugly, noisy and serene, and somehow it works. In a big way. Completely dizzying and confusional, warped and warbly, but in it's own ugly duckling manner quite pretty. If all that blissed out fuzzscape crap is a little too mellow for you, but you still want to be dragged off to some other world, Nonhorse might be the little red pill you've been waiting for.
Mastered by the Yellow Swans' Pete Swanson.
We love this band so much. We were never able to get enough of their last record to list, but now that the new one is here, it's time to finally share our crazy love of this band with the loyal AQ faithful.
Ostensibly a black metal band, but sonically anything but. Imagine a super lo-fi, sort of new wave, gothy crusty punk rock band but with buzzing insectoid riffing and occasional furious blast beats. Sort of like a black metal Rudimentary Peni, with a vocalist who sounds a bit like a cross between Roz Williams of Christian Death and Mark E. Smith from the Fall. Whiney and snotty, super dramatic and over the top, even at their most buzzing and black, the vocals kick in and the band is transformed back into some crusty black new wave weirdness. And the guitar parts are super weird, strange harmonies, a little new wave, but a little NO wave as well. But the band themselves don't consider their music to be black metal anyway. A quick look at their website reveals the fact that they consider themselves "faerical blasting punk!" Just check out the note from the band on their website:
"Nuit Noire is the only faerical blasting punk band in the world. The music comes directly from the depths of the night, where the fairies stay hidden from the humans. We love them and they love us."
Woah. Just one more reason to love these guys. Weird angular guitars, fucked up arrangements, damaged new wave riffing, some black blasts, a demonic shriek here and there, all that and faeries too!!
Watch out Senor Coconut! You might have someone on your tail. This is a record that was put out on a German label by an Amsterdam based Ukrainian born electronic artist known as German Popov who calls his project OMFO(Our Man From Odessa). With its Kraftwerk inspired title, Trans Balkan Express is made up many traditional Eastern European folk songs gone totally electro, dubbed out and quirky. OMFO do the same kind of genre and global combinations and bastardizations that Senor Coconut has made famous and somehow manage to come out sounding so endearing and infectious instead of schlocky and annoying. Old world sounds given a proper modern weirdo twist. Trans Balkan Express actually came out a couple years ago without much press or attention. Though it was a big hit at KUSF and much college radio it didn't seem to get its rightful attention. But thanks to its inclusion in the Borat movie and soundtrack it's been given a new lease on life. And with a new record in the works and an upcoming tour with none other then Senor Coconut we're sure to be geeking out to lots more OMFO in the future.
Some of our favorite records over the last few years have come from our customers. As in, recorded and released by, not just recommended by. I mean, it makes perfect sense, that folks into cool weird music, would be making cool weird music themselves, but nevertheless it's always a nice surprise. Whether it's the delicate dreamy folk of Ilyas Ahmed, or the crushing doom of Monument of Urns, it's always exciting to discover that the guy who buys all the weird cd-r's, or the customer who is always ordering super limited vinyl is in fact, making some strange and wondrous sounds themselves.
Such is the case with our Italian mailorder customer Francesco Paladino, who has teamed up with Opum (Paladino seems to prefer the collaboration, having joined forces with lots of folks in the past including dronesters Alio Die) for a record of epic and hauntingly cinematic low end explorations. Field recordings are deftly woven into huge sprawling drones, strangled falsetto vocals and growling grumbled voices drift ominously amidst the slowly swirling low end ambience. Chimes tinkle and random bits of percussion float restlessly above thick fuzzy synthesizers, all the while more and more strange animalistic vocalisations enter the mix. Birdsong and simple percussion are the framework of one track, while a pulsing synthesized throb another, FX swirl effortlessly over the sound of scraping stones, whispering wind, distant chanting. The vibe is strangely liturgical, one can imagine this disc as the soundtrack to some slow moving Italian giallo, Goblin handling the freaked out progged up horror parts, while Paladino and Opum handle the suspense, the dark shadowy corridors, a long walk through a moonlit park, the foreboding feeling that death lurks around every corner. Creepy and sinister and ominously beautiful.
The British avant-garde saxophone titan's latest release for John Zorn's Tzadik label is something that we think will appeal to more than just the regular "jazz peeps" out there. It's one for those into Steve Reich style 20th century minimalism as well -- or any sort of mesmerizing, droning, repetitive music that can be both beautiful and challenging.
Evan Parker, a stalwart of the UK/European free improv scene since the '60s, is known for both his mastery of the "circular breathing" technique (which can prolong his soloing seemingly indefinitely -- it's a sight to behold if you ever get to see him play!!) and, more recently, for being very open to the use of experimental computer/electronic processing in the context of live acoustic improv. While Time Lapse doesn't involve electronic effects, it does use the studio in a way unusual in jazz, heavily overdubbing the multiple saxophone (and on one track, organ) lines played by Parker. Once set in motion, these burbling streams of sound gradually, mentally mesh into "clouds" of music that in places recall a horn version of AQ fave pianist Lubomyr Melnick. Actually, a few of these pieces ARE in fact completely solo, just one track of saxophone, yet it's testament to Parker's incredible technique that they still sound overdubbed and "multivoiced" even when they're actually not!!!
The melodic and tonal qualities of the eleven tracks here certainly differ... some sound completely soothing, with all the prettiness of birdsong, whereas others have more of a seasick, "squeaky wheel that needs the grease" thing going on, like bagpipes fed backwards through a tape machine or something. As mentioned above, we're reminded of Steve Reich, some of this almost sounding somewhere betwixt that swinging pendulum microphone feedback piece of his, and the endless, skronky improv blowing of solo sax familiar to fans of Charles Gayle, Anthony Braxton, Peter Brotzmann... or Evan Parker. Cool.
We first discovered Phantom Limb on the now out of print collaboration with Japanese guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama released on aRCHIVE a few months back. Phantom Limb aka one half of East Coast noisemakers PeeEssEye, brought to the table a cacophony of whirring organs and grinding guitars, a blown out expanse of buzzing drone and strange swirling guitar ambience.
For this disc, Phantom Limb have teamed up with Bison, who as far as we can tell plays contrabass clarinet, and between the two 'outfits' manage to creep and crawl through two half hour slabs of far out drift and roar. the first track see's and saw's back and forth between, blissful tranquility, minimal synthesizer buzz, warm chordal whir and huge grinding slabs of angular low end scrape and squeal, spending more time in the soft than the loud, but the loud bits are extra loud to make up for it.
The second track is one long drone, that works its way through various textures and timbres, it's here that you can really discern the presence of a clarinet, but just barely, this is no free jazz skronk fest, instead, it's a sort of Niblockish war of overtones, slabs of sound beating against one another as tones gradually shift and subtly interact. Dense and deep, layers continually being added and transformed, other layers constantly being peeled away revealing some other strange subtle sonic alchemy underneath. Nice.
Limited to 200, each disc hand numbered.
Packaged in a cool card stock sleeve with printed sticker with liner notes and artwork.
Another one to file under "NWOFHM"! New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal. That's Pharaoh Overlord/Circle bassist Jussi's little joke. Only now it's gone waaaaay beyond joking. Or to another level of joke anyway. What we're saying, is that this fourth Pharaoh Overlord opus is a headbanger's delight, for real. Sure, Pharaoh Overlord were already supposed to be the "heavy" Circle side project, and they were, but not like this. This ain't mere 'stoner rock', this doesn't sound anything like Kyuss anymore. Instead, they've adopted chugging speed metal riffage that could be from an Accept album circa 1984, lashed it to their usual repetitive krautrocky rhythms, unleashed some very metal vocals, and gone entirely over to the dark side (which, by the way, is the title of one of our favorite tracks here, the album-ending 8+ minute instrumental epic that just drives a mean riff into your brain like the spiked fist thru the face of the skull in the cd booklet!!)). They even snuck a little umlaut in over the 2nd 'o' in 'Overlord' on the spine of this cd.
Circle (and Pharaoh Overlord at this point have pretty much the exact same lineup as Circle, it's basically the same band) have dropped big hints about their love of metal before -- making references in their graphics and in their music, with many tracks on such albums as Sunrise and Tulikoira being pretty darn metal, as we've noted before -- but here they go whole hog. They sound less like a spacerock band who want to give a nod to metal with a riff here and there, than like a really weird actual metal band! It's rifftastic, hypnotic biker metal with a strange psychedelic side to it. And best of all -- it works! It's a high concept success (and as we mentioned, they've been seemingly high on this concept before, but never have been this tight with it). The unpredictable predictability of any Circle or Circle-related album, their basic kraut-inspired, "circular" formula, stands up to and indeed seems to embrace this metallic obsession. The tick-tock percussion and cyclical riffs just wind up tension, even as they entrance the listener, making this so very heavy and ominous in a way that maybe no other metal band would or could explore but they'd have to appreciate. AMAZING!!
Can Jussi and Co. get any more metal than this? Well soon we'll see when we get the upcoming Circle cdep Earthworm which features Bruce Duff from '80s alt-metal band Jesters Of Destiny on vocals! Supposed to be pretty darn heavy. Stay tuned.
Early last year we fell head over heels for the Psychic Ills album Dins. It was some of the best post-punk gone spacey psych-rock with a punch we had heard in quite a while. What was even more impressive was how they seemed to have come out of nowhere. We had never heard them before so we just assumed that Dins was their debut. We later found out that in fact they had released a couple EPs before, but there was no way we were able to get our hands on them as they were very limited 12"s called Mental Violence I and Mental Violence II. Those two 12"s make up this reissue along side some previously unreleased tracks. While not drastically different in sound than Dins, these recordings are a little more raw and primitive sounding. While there are countless bands influenced by Joy Division, what's so nice about Psychic Ills is how they have translated that influence into their own sound. Instead of just focusing on doing a poor imitation of Ian Curtis' vocal stylings, they understand the sensuality and dark swirling lust that made Joy Division so special. This is almost how we imagine Interpol would sound if they were way more rough around the edges and allowed themselves to get lost in hypnotizing guitar and hazy melody. Kind of like Spacemen 3 practicing in a sparse basement with an 8-track, a strobe light and some really good weed. Umm... isn't that what Spacemen 3 did? Regardless, highly recommended!
Does technology exist that instantly turns the rapid random wanderings of the mind into music? Listening to Street Lights sure makes us think it must! It's as if someone's gone and plugged that machine directly into the (we're guessing bong-luvvin') brain of one Mr. Jordan Rain. His new album jumps about so wildly it'll have you puzzledly scratching your own head at every turn. Hell, we felt we almost had to roll ourselves a fatty just to review it!
If Jordan looks / sounds somehow familiar to you, there's many possible reasons why. A veritable North Western underground musical legend, he's been a member of Reeks & The Wrecks (whose sole posthumous release came out on Andee's tUMULt label a while back), Behead The Prophet No Lord Shall Live, Alamo Social Club and Robert Blake's High Wide & Handsome Band. He's also been spotted recently as the frontman for his eight member Yogoman Burning Band.
Anyways, Street Lights is Jordan's second cd of tunes he wrote, played, and recorded all by himself. The instruments and vocals were recorded through the pinhole mic in his iBook directly into the Garageband computer program, where he overdubbed and mixed everything. The aural effects laden grab bag contains everything from answering machine snippits and non-verbal vocalizing to white boy soul falsetto crooning, trippy dubbed out reggae, slow burning laid back grooves, wild percussive freakouts and even a sing-a-long with a baby. Weird and warped, and maybe best listened to under the influence...
While the recent output of T. Raumschmiere exploded with megawatt dancefloor stomps bridging the glizty grooves of '70s glam rock and the insistency of Berlin techno, Random Noize Sessions Vol. 1 is a far moodier affair. This collection of unreleased and live tracks dating back to 1999 oozes with minor-key atmospheres wrapped around subdued rhythms from the Berlin techno template. Marco Haas (the man behind the T. Raumschmiere persona) locates numerous interludes of darkened Pop Ambience throughout the rhythmic tracks; but the rhythms are his bread and butter. This is especially true on the more oblique "GrobMotorOmsk" which is not terribly discreet in its references to the NZ electron loop misanthrope Omit. Just as Haas was pretty obvious in his electro-punk numbers citing Gary Glitter and the Sweet, why not draw from one of the under-recognized masters of modern day electronica?
Ah, Reigns. This UK band is one of our favorites when it comes to gentle, electronica-flecked post-rock loveliness. You could compare 'em to lots of stuff, from Godspeed You Black Emperor! to Sigur Ros to Eluvium to to Stafraenn Hakon... but what makes Reigns rule is that they create an additional layer of conceptual strangeness, each recording, despite being mostly instrumental, supposedly documenting an "investigation" into a specific, mysterious, otherworldly locale. On their first album, entitled We Lowered A Microphone Into The Ground, reviewed here last year, was "about" exactly what the title suggests. Plumbing the depths of the earth with a microphone, Reigns "operatives A & B" experienced disturbing psychosomatic (?) phenomena... it was all very surreal and vague and created an intriguing aesthetic dissonance between the very pretty music and the accompanying text.
This new full-length is along the same lines, another dreamy experience, quietly melodic and placid, this time a soundtrack of sorts to the exploration of a lost village, Styne Vallis, in a Wessex valley damned up and flooded long ago to make a reservoir. It's -not- in any sense a field recording -- the drowned pastoral landscape this documents is conjured conceptually by the music alone. It's more about evoking emotions of these places than images. Again what makes this have extra resonance is that as gorgeous as this music is, there are little hints of something else, something sinister afoot... something weird, maybe wrong, is going on, in the background. This music is suggestive of secrets. Curious and curiouser it and its listeners both will be...
Warm and detailed and sooo good. Recommended.
First off, what's with bands that stick an excess "J" into their name? Wooden Shjips... Frijid Pink... now Reptiljan! Well we love those bands, so we'll take the "J" in Reptiljan as a good sign. Another good sign: these guys are from Finland! All well and wonderful so far you say, but what the heck do they sound like? Well, this is something for folks who've been digging the apocalyptic metallic drum machine fueled hardcore electronic mayhem of such recently reviewed (and raved about) discs as Drumcorps, and that Drum>Machinegun compilation, along with the drillnbass mashups of DJ/Rupture, DJ Scud, Venetian Snares, and Jason Forrest.
This Reptiljan disc is a full auto barrage of lethal stuttering stittering glitchery. Totally AGGRO...vating...ahh...love it!!! Twisted humor, twisted sonics, utterly abrasive and so satisfyingly scratching that itch we have for over-the-top digitally damaged jackhammering laced with samples and noise. Pretty much cranked to maximum distortion, even when exploring crinkly textures rather than higher BPM velocities as some of this does, The Hellbender Suite is certainly EXTREME ten ways from Sunday. Perhaps it might indicate something to you if we quote the dedication on this cd: "to Nuclear Death, Beherit, Impetigo and Cryptobranchus alleganiensis." The latter item being not an extreme underground metal band, but rather the scientific name of the variety of salamander in fact known more commonly as the "hellbender".
The last time we reviewed a Ben Reynolds disc was way back in 2005, and even then we were sort of lamenting our inability to keep up with the constant deluge of amazing cd-r's and the proliferation of cd-r microlabels. We're still trying, but it's fighting a losing battle.
And with Reynolds, we've fallen even further behind, this being only the second release we've managed to review out of the probably twenty or so we've missed, but what the hell, let's make the most of it. Thankfully this is a real cd-r not a cd-r, which is a god thing as this is way too good to only be heard by a handful of folks.
Reynolds weaves a magical lower case world of buzzing synths, strange percolating rhythms, disembodied psychedelic guitars, simple folky strum, and dense sheets of processed drone and whir. Occupying a sonic space somewhere between the freaky forest folkies and the spaced out drone-y drifters, Reynolds wanders freely back and forth often pausing with one foot in each, wrapping sweet little bundles of buzzing steel strings in tripped out sci-fi buzz and bleep, while conversely taking washed out smears of outerspace ambience and spreading them out beneath melancholy acoustic guitar melodies. Fans of all thing Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, PseudoArcana, Digitalis, Last Visible Dog and the like will absolutely want to get a hold of this....
This band name may have elicited a few snickers around these parts, but there is nothing funny about Sweden's Rimfrost. Any and all smiles were quickly wiped from the offending faces once the play button was pushed. No record in recent memory has resulted in so much spontaneous headbanging amongst the AQ metalheads. While ostensibly a black metal band, the vibe and sound on A Frozen World Unknown is way more death metal, and while we're sometimes down on the death metal, none of us would hesitate to jump all over a kick ass slab of ultra brutal death metal. And goddamn if this isn't just that. This record is so amazing. Heavy and chuggy, fast and incredibly LOUD, the drums are insane, the riffing is incredible with plenty of pick squeals and downtuned buzz, but the songs are so totally catchy, and weirdly groovy. Super convoluted stop start arrangements, but not complex for complex sake, those parts actually make sense in the context of the rest of the song and somehow manage to be just as catchy as the rest of the track. Strangely epic and anthemic, a bit melodic, but ultimately just intense and furious and fucking awesome. Absolutely one of our favorite new metal records, death, black or otherwise...
We blew through the last issue of this upstart UK music mag, so we grabbed a few extra copies this time around but we imagine these still won't be around for long. Giving UK's mighty Wire magazine a run for their money, Rock-A-Rolla cover the same sort of underground weirdness but with a definite slant toward the noisy and heavy, which of course we're all for!
This time, we've got Wolf Eyes on the cover. Inside there are plenty of familiar faces, Jazzkammer, Yellow Swans, KK Null, Burning Star Core, Aethenor, Made Out Of Babies, an awesome Sub Pop label feature highlighting some of our favorite all time records, TONS of album reviews, DVD reviews, live show reviews and on the back page, a one minute interview with Makoto Kawabata from Acid Mothers Temple. Another killer issue. We're already anxiously awaiting the next one!
Bay Area songstress Rupa Marya follows up her solo self released debut La Pecheuse with the considerably more elaborate and impassioned Extraordinary Rendition. Four of the original seven songs make a reappearance here. This time Rupa's joined by an excellent backing band. The April Fishes are trumpeteer Marcus Cohen, Adrian Jost on accordion, cellist Ed Baskerville (who also played on La Pecheuse), Eliyahu Sills on upright bass and the peculiarly tagged 'contraptionist' Aaron Kierbel. They sing and play together with such wonderful ease and gusto, it's as if they've been playing together for years. Their multilingual music draws from cross-cultural influences and source material -- Indian ragas, tango, French chanson, bossa nova, jazz, not to mention numerous forms of folk music from around the world -- which conjures words like slinky, fevered, hypnotic and intoxicating. Vocally, Ms Rupa has drawn comparisons to the sultry formidable likes of Lhasa and Mia Doi Todd, but she can also take a very Cat Poweresque, down-home folk pop turn as is sweetly evident on the closing number "Wishful Thinking". They'll surely have many fans in common in the near future!
As for the reasons for the reprise of the Sacher-Pelz moniker, maybe we'll never know; regardless, Maurizio Bianchi has returned to the name that started his illustrious career of sinister, industrial abstraction some thirty years ago. In the late '70s, Bianchi recorded a handful of cassettes as Sacher-Pelz using little more than a turntable, a varispeed 4-track, some well worn Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Conrad Schnitzler LPs as source material, and lots of rough-cut tape splicing in a primitive attempt at a ghastly variation on musique concrete with a few moments of toxic brilliance. Four of those early cassettes had been reissued in a Sacher-Pelz box through E'est / Alga Marghen (who were also responsible for the reissues of the 10 classic M.B. recordings from the early '80s). That box set evaporated from the market very quickly, along with most of those classic M.B. records. For the 2006 incarnation of Sacher-Pelz, Bianchi cites as his source material "concretonic irradition for concrete noises, efflorescent loops, and foetologic guitar." Ah, yes, Bianchi has always had a way with the English language! The sounds that he musters from those sources has much more in common with those that he generated as M.B. particularly found on his 1983 masterpiece The Plain Truth. Clerzphase swarms with a post-mortem atmosphere as cold cold cold electronic vibrations offer little room beyond intense claustrophobia. Hints of horror film minor key melodies and megaphone-distorted vocals may be lurking in the mix, yet Bianchi's vibrating patterns are so relentless as to obfuscate every undergirding sound to the Sacher-Pelz death-ambient mantras.
Limited to 250 copies.
Oh Selda! We are soooooooo in love with your voice! We first heard you on the amazing Love Peace and Poetry compilation of Turkish psychedelic music and ever since then, we just wanted more more more! Last year we got our Selda fix with a collection of vinyl transfers released by World Psychedelia, and now finally we get another full serving of Selda that we've so desperately been craving! No surprise that the fine folks with impeccable taste at B-Music/Finders Keepers are responsible for this amazing collection of Selda at her best! With a singular voice that demands and grabs your attention with such utter flare, seduction and style, Selda is truly a musical treasure who we're sure will win the ears and hearts of just about anyone who listens. Every song has a rich musical backdrop, perfectly cradling her lovely vocals, with a sound that has no easy genre lines to point to, but that so few have touched on with such perfection. It's psych-rock and glorious pop, it's folk and funk, it's fun and dramatic, its whatever it wants to be, and it's a collection of songs with absolutely no misses! There is a playfulness in the performances that totally imbue the songs with a rich full color fever that just can't be denied. While some reissues exist more for history's sake or for just a couple cool tracks, this is one of those records that requires repeated listening, and lord knows we have listened to this over and over and over. In some ways we even think of Selda like a Turkish version of Asha Bhosle, with that sort of amazing voice that turns everything it touches into musical magic.
Way beyond recommended!
What do you do when one day, you're just another decent, sort of well known indie rock band who writes really great songs and then suddenly you become probably the most famous indie rock band around thanks to a big Hollywood movie and waves of big time hype. Well if you are The Shins you just keep writing totally great songs and remain the same great band that made us all fall in love with them in the first place. It's so nice to see how unfazed they seem to be after their huge rise in popularity. You get the feeling that Wincing The Night Away is the same record they would have made, had luck not been how it was and they still remained a somewhat obscure (by mainstream standards) indie rock band from New Mexico. The infectious breezy melodies are definitely still there. Smart pop that draws upon the richest of influences yet now sounds so singularly their own. Songs that seep into your head and have no plan of leaving anytime soon. Wincing The Night Away also finds them exploring a more moody side. The Shins are like that great friend who gets famous but still calls every time they are in town and you aren't jealous of their fame just super happy for them.
PS. The first batch of these come with an awesome 7" with a non-album track and the e.p. version of Split Needles, can't promise 'em forever but you'll get one with your purchase while they last...
PPS. Also note that these don't go on sale 'til Tuesday 1/23, we can't sell 'em 'til then!
We were a little put off by the band name, quite a mouthful, but we were super psyched when we got an earful of these guys' super aggressive, epic, post metal crunch. Tough to stand out these days in the super saturated genre pool that is metallic post rock but these guys manage to pull it off big time, borrowing equally from nineties post rock, crusty sludge, epic instrumental chamber rock, and then adding in their own 2 cents. Obviously fans of Pelican and Mogwai and Isis and Snowblood and all that stuff will want this. But there's a whole lot more going on. Some Morricone-ish spaghetti western twang, complete with harmonica, some Krautrock-y groove, some bits of twangy slide guitar, thick swaths of fuzzy drifting guitar ambience, dizzying angular riffing, dense tribal drumming, buzzing almost new wave sounding synths, some long stretches of moody indie jangle. But it's the bands' deft hand with melody and songwriting and arrangement that makes this record so moving. The focus is way more on mood and texture than heaviness or brutality (although it is occasionally both heavy and brutal), with the epic slow builds often taking up the majority of a song, or a crushing dirge suddenly collapsing into the prettiest dang melody you've ever heard. And c'mon, let's mention the slide guitar again. We're such suckers for the slippery dreaminess of slide guitar. We sort of wish it was everywhere, on every song, but as it is, when it does kick in, we get goosebumps.
So yeah, there's always room for one more on the post rock epic metal sludge bandwagon, as long as they're doing something new and different with the sound, and thus working hard to knock someone else off.
There is no doubt that we have a big soft spot for so much of the music that comes out of West Africa and Mali in particular, so we were not sure how we missed the first album from this great Mali outfit called Tartit, but we are more then pleased to jump on their fan wagon with their new outing Abacabok. Recorded in the northern Mali desert by Congotronics producer Vincent Kenis, this is a record that keeps you captivated from start to finish. Call and response vocals, handclaps and percussion creating the perfect back-beat, three-string lute and one string fiddle, a few moments of electric guitar. It all comes together to form a record that feels so coherent, hypnotic and grounded to the salt of the earth. Fans of Tinariwen and Ali Farka Toure will be thrilled to hear this record. And just about everyone here at AQ has caught the Tartit fever with a fury! This is really great!
It's been so cold here lately (well you know cold for us California types) and there is something about To Rococo Rot's warm electronic sounds that hits the spot right about now. While so much of the melodic electronica that has come out since they burst onto the scene has gotten quite stale and predictable there is something always so consistent and perfect about what To Rococo Rot produce.
The kind of record that's so nice to have on while you linger in thoughts, half awake and in your pajamas not really wanting to leave the comfort of your bedroom or face the cold outside.
Experimental folk music for moonlit nights. Tucker, multi-instrumentalist and member of Ginnungagap, has a voice that fits nicely between Ben Chasny and Brian Eno, however most of Furrowed Brow is instrumental. These long cyclical numbers fall between melodic acoustic guitar progressions with melodicas and spacey keyboards and out-music workouts of clarinet and guitar distortion. Perfect for a moody and mind-altering evening around the campfire.
A couple years ago this fine album by Two Gallants' was released on cd, and was quite warmly received around these parts. Well, we're pleased to report that it's finally made its way onto vinyl!
Here's what we said about the cd version back in 2004:
Lately we've been getting quite a number of customers comin' in asking for these fellas. Two Gallants weave a solid nine rootsy rock songs with beleaguered male vocals right up front and center. Actually the vocals have an emotive gruffness sorta like a cross between Vic Chesnutt and Cat Stevens (or like what Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst might sound like in twenty years). Tempo and mood-wise The Two Gallants sure keep you on yer toes, easily go from smoky slowly winding somber odes straight into feisty harmonica and whisky-fueled rollickers and back again. Guitars get a hearty workout from the gentle plucking and feverish strumming. Nice.
Wow. In the span of a couple years, the Numero Group label has become the most exciting reissue label around. From the haunting electronic samba Young Marble Giants worship of Antena, to the long lost soul of the Capsoul label, the missing funk of the Bandit label, the creepy country beauty of Fern Jones to the amazing Yellow Pills power pop combination. Makes us dizzy just thinking about it.
So here we have what might possibly be the first collection of funk-soul-calypso-reggae from Belize. And it's a rollicking joyous non stop party. The influence of American R&B and soul is everywhere, and of course, so is Jamaican reggae. But with any comp like this, it's not the influences, it's what you do with them. So the tracks here run the gamut from, super emotive soulful crooning over warm warbly organs and wavery horns, full on dubbed out reggae rave ups, down and dirty gritty funky workouts, reverb drenched fifties sounding rock and roll, total Shaft / theme from some seventies sitcom slap bass disco funk and on and on. All infused with the spirt of the city and the era in which they were created. Joyful and hopeful, fun and spirited and lively and just a total blast. We've been listening to this nonstop, and everytime we play it in the store, somebody buys one!
Initially we were thrown for a puzzlacious loop by the title. Sounds a lot like the Pamela Des Barres autobiography! Then, admittedly not being familiar with the phrase 'Sacred Harp', we also thought the subtitle might be somewhat misleading. We did a little homework though, and found out that it is a traditional choral singing style originating in the Southern states, gospel folksong with a repertory of pre-Civil War vintage. Whew, glad we got it all figured out. Anyways, confusion and definitions aside, the strength of this compilation is something far less complicated. An amazing document of both individual vocalists and congregations singing en masse, it exemplifies the power of the human voice, in concert with spiritual belief. Quite a force to behold, at once both humbling and uplifting. This disc is the aural companion to the documentary film Awake, My Soul, which we're now eager to see, after having spun this numerous times since it showed up here!
The absolutely wonderful Dust-To-Digital label (responsible for the massive, wooden Goodbye, Babylon box set, and the Fonotone one too, among other treats) has again done a great job with the compiling and packaging of these olde timey treasures. The 30-track cd is housed in a handsome cardboard foldy kind of pack, and of course in the cd booklet there's an expert essay on sacred harp singing, as well as individual track notes. As the subtitle indicates, this is a recorded tradition going back 85 years. The earliest recording here dates from 1922, with plenty more from the '20s, '30s, '40s and '50s -- along with several from 2006. We like the timbre of the older recordings best, of course (and the scratchier the recording, the better in our view!), but they're all pretty awesome (an appropriate word to use in this context, in its deepest meaning!). Majestically eerie, moving, and powerful are these songs raised to heaven. As voices overlap and merge, some of these tracks begin to almost sound like some avant-garde 20th century, prog choral piece or something. Others have more of a hillbilly, homey appeal. It's all quite beautiful, and highly recommended!!
HOLEEEEEE SHIT! You better tie down your speakers, strap on a helmet, put on some safety goggles and stand WAY back before you drop the needle on this. Three bands, doing super blown out fuzzed out needle in the red psychedelic space rock interpretations of, well, some psychedelic space rock.
The Heads take up a whole side with their rendition of Hawkwind's "Born To Go", and if you need anything more than the words "The Heads play Hawkwind" then there is something seriously wrong with you. It's almost exponential, like instead of Hawkwind filtered through the Heads, it becomes Hawkwind TIMES the Heads TIMES lots of drugs and TIMES about a million amplifiers. Super blown out acid fired drug drenched space rock nirvana!!!
And if you survive side one, side two will certainly do you in, Plastic Crimewave Sound starts it up with a smoking version of the Edgar Broughton Band's "Why Can't Somebody Love Me?" which is damn near as fierce as the Heads' track, needle pegged to the red, guitars set to stun, controls set for the heart of the sun, a furiously face-melting blast of outer space rock and roll. Finally, Lillydamwhite, who we had never heard before, cover the Pink Fairies' "Uncle Harry's Last Freakout" and while not as fierce as either of the two other tracks, is still pretty rocking with a super propulsive groove and killer riffs wrapped in spacey FX.
Total space rock overload and WE LOVE IT!!!
Comes in a cool Crimewave designed sleeve (designed to look like an old psychedelic flyer) with a bunch of printed inserts.
SUPER LIMITED. we only got a handful and we may not be able to get more...
Exactly what you might expect from a compilations called One Man Drone, 4 'groups', each made up of one member, each exploring their own idea of the drone. And that's where it stops being exactly what you might expect. As all four of these groups (three French and one Swiss) have dramatically different ideas of what constitutes drone music. And of course all of them are right...
Up first is the misleadingly monickered Shit, who sound anything but, a super minimal ghostly glow, distant whirs wreathed in low end crumble, like slowly sinking in some sort of sonic quicksand. Imagine listening to Fennesz at ONE RPM, an impossibly slow, murky, glacial dirge, rife with melted melodies, an abstract crawl through a world of low end mystery, realized on a battery of homemade instruments. Up next is Oldine, whose sound is as different from Shit's as you could possibly imagine. A loping, lazy, dreamlike post rock, the drone is not so obvious, but it is definitely there, riffs cycle and repeat, lilting and hypnotic, stripped down, blissed out, laid back, melancholy, and yeah, droney in a very subtle pretty way.
Side two starts off with Tamagawa, who return to a much more orthodox exploration of the drone, a heavily layered guitarscape, sounding quite a bit like the opening riff off Sabbath's "Iron Man" pulled apart and slowed waaaaaay down, a dirgey sludgey metallic riff that just repeats and repeats, allowing the buzz to drift and crumble each time before the riff kicks in again, taken on its own, this stuff would definitely hit the spot for SUNNO))) freaks and Earth nerds...
The hands down winner though of this 4 way tag team match has to be B Tong (it's actually B, then the little degrees symbol, then Tong, but for some reason that won't show up right on our website) who have managed some truly bizarre, gorgeously freaky cinematic dronemusic. Opening with a burst of playful Peter & The Wolf flutes and strings, the track quickly becomes a roiling soundscape of environmental recordings, demonic dark ambience, bits of classical music, and all manner of distorted and processed sounds and samples.
Snippets of playful classical music are swallowed up by thick swirls of grinding sludge, slowed down strings vibrate and pulse, FX swirl and obfuscate everything, mumbled vocals, processed blasts of industrial clatter and streaks of pealing bells, all get tangled up into the dark and heady mix. Almost like a Philip Jeck mix of Goblin and Wolf Eyes!!
Pressed on clear vinyl, with wispy colored streaks, packaged alongside a thick piece of hand painted cardboard, with two thick printed inserts. LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!!!
An amazing archival collection focusing on the work of legendary Finnish alternative underground punk rock legend Laja Aijala, who was a crucial figure in the early days of Finland's thriving musical underground. This disc collects some of the best moments from all of his various musical pursuits. The Throbbing industrial clamor of Aavikon Kone Ja Moottori, Finland's FIRST industrial band, his damaged garage rockabilly combo the Billy Boys, the D-beat Discharge worship of Terveet Kadet, the punk rock doom splatter of Death Trip, the brilliantly demented Casio-tiki lounge music of the Leo Bugariloves, the primitive murky electronic krautrock synth experimentation of the Kolmas and much more.
It's easy to see how the rest of our Finnish faves were influenced by Aijala, and they all seem to have taken his omnivorous love of music and incorporated it into their own modus operandi, seemingly flitting from genre to genre, often in the same band, sometimes even in the same song. And pretty much every Finnish musician we know has multiple projects, from metal to drone to krautrock to new wave and on and on and on.
Some of the highlights here:
The Kolmas, who wove grinding murky lo fi synthscapes out of primitive keyboards, simple looped drum machine percussion, dense dark drones and thick washes of crumbling distorted synthesizers.
Death Trip: grimy grungy low slung filthy garagey punk rock, with scowled distorted vocals, simple riffing, pounding drums, fuzzed out guitars, sort of Motorhead meets Smack.
Aavikon Kone Ja Moottori: bleak, oppressive industrial soundscapes, hypnotic looped synths, primitive electronic experimentation, processed chanted vocals, all very dark and drearily ominous.
And actually it's all pretty damn good. The Leo Bugariloves will definitely appeal to the legion of Aavikko fanatics, the Billy Boys, Aijala's rockabilly combo, who we figured we wouldn't like at all, is recorded so hot and raw and in the red, that it almost sounds like Fushitsusha playing Hasil Adkins. Wild and unhinged and so good.
A completely fascinating glimpse into the history of the underground music scene that birthed so much of our favorite music. Essential!!!
Ohh La La! This is pretty undeniably AMAZING! A snapshot of 60's French-pop perfection. We dare you to put this on and not start feeling a little more stylish, a little more classy, a little more sassy,
and a whole lot more happy! This is hands down one of the best collections of dance-party inducing French pop to grace our ears in ages. While we loved the Swinging Mademoiselles comp covering the same era, this collection almost makes that record pale in comparison. Pop A Paris is pretty much a who's who of French pop during this golden-era. Serge Gainsbourg, France Gall, Brigitte Bardot, Michel Polnareff, Delphine, Marie Laforet, etc etc! But what makes this comp so incredible are the songs! Not one snoozer in the bunch, every single one bursting with color, spunk and f-u-n-! Cover versions of "These Boots Are Made For Walking", "My Generation", "Paint it Black", and "Happy Together" all somehow manage to make us only want to hear these versions from now on and NEVER the originals. And the non-covers are just as spot-on-perfect.
This has been out for a few years now and had been a kind of secret weapon in DJ sets by Irwin. Can't count the times that putting one of these songs on during a show has resulted in a dancefloor packed with wide smiles and shaking booties. So totally recommended!
A killer comp from the fairly new Singing Knives label, a who's who of underground cd-r artists, only a few of which we've actually heard, a bunch of which we will most definitely be trying to find more music by. Not sure exactly what the theme of this comp is, maybe all these folks have records coming out on SK, or maybe it's just a killer mix tape, either way, it's a beauty and flows really well. One of those comps that sounds like it could be the best record by the best (and obviously most eclectic) band ever....
From the super blown out ultra distorted Eastern buzz of Tirath Singh Nirmala to the haunting gypsy folk of The One Ensemble Of Daniel Padden to the murky string buzzing drone of Bridget Hayden to the burbling underwater drift of Ben Reynolds to the simple stripped down moody folk of the Feather Gatherers to the flute flecked spacey krautrocky drone (fuck yeah!!!) of the Michael Flower Band and every stop in between. Those and a handful of equally pretty and buzzy and droning tracks from Peril Hill, Chora, McWatt, Directing Hand, James Green, Inecto School, Nalle, Tau Emerald and the Big Eyes Family Players might not have you singing at the moon, but at the very least will have you in absolute headphone mixtape bliss!
From the same label that brought us the latest from Tarentel mainman Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and the collected works of The Alps (both reviewed elsewhere on this list) comes this compilation called Small Melodies. And that is precisely what this is, each artist was asked to contribute a piece of music which represented their interpretation of small melodies, given simple guidelines such as "warm" and "calm" and the results are absolutely lovely. Exactly what you might imagine a record of warm, calm, small melodies might sound like. Each artist offers his own particular sound, but they all work surprisingly well together as a whole, a bit like a more varied Pop Ambient compilation, or how you might imagine a Morr Music Pop Ambient record would sound. Lots of familiar faces, Oren Ambarchi, Ultra Milkmaids, Stephan Mathieu, Taylor Deupree, Sogar, Tape, but even more unfamiliar ones: Naph, Aen, Mondii, RdL, Fenton...
Glistening expanses of digital glitch and sparkling drift, fuzzy muted melodies buried under thick swirls of dreamlike fuzz, blissed out post rock splintered into drifting shards of soft focus melody, ultra abstract field recordings wrapped in barely there drones, digital abstractions smeared into warm bleary blurs, thick swells of sound like distant bells wrapped in thick sheets of reverb, pretty pop pulled under a slowly spreading swirl of otherworldly thrum, wheezing accordions and intricate steel string fingerpicking tangled up in strange alien bleep and buzz, every track is the perfect soundtrack to a dream, the whole record an all night drift through a warm and calm world of small melodies.
Packaged in a cool, sleek oversized digipak style folder, with striking silver foil printing on white matte background.
The Numero Group and their Eccentric Soul series have helped usher in a new era of comprehensive and well thought out reissues of amazing long lost soul music that so deserves the chance to reach more ears. And we couldn't be happier Since that music totally hits the spot for us. We're also happy that other labels like This Rabbit Factory are popping up to help preserve more of the sounds of artists and labels that otherwise would just be erased from history. This collection is a look into the soulful sounds that came out of Birmingham, Alabama. Best known as being the center of the Civil Rights struggle this compilation puts its focus on The Sound of Birmingham studio run by a plumber named Neal Hemphill. In his studio the best and brightest of the Birmingham soul scene had the opportunity to record inside a real studio that was dedicated to the sounds of soul. Many of these musicians never even performed live but got to lay down some seriously warm and solid soul tracks in Hemphill's studio. A very welcome addition to the recent soul reissue explosion.
Latest issue in this amazing sound art magazine box series. Each issue comes in beautiful printed box, and contains a cd and a series of full color cards printed on thick card stock. Very nice. Published twice a year by a team of artists and journalists in France, Vibro is, as it says on the box, "A cross between an art piece and a specialized magazine. A sonic object, a chronicle of electroacoustic and lo-fi experiments." Indeed! This issue contains pieces by Stephen Vitiello, Kinglet, Joan Schuman, Mark Vernon, Eva Sjuve, Christian Zanesi, Zoe Irvine, Aland Dunn & Jeff Young, Tonic Train, Pete Stollery, SI_COM and Tereza Neuma and features a full color card for each artist, with a full color reproduction of the artist's original artwork on one side, and on the other a description of the artist, a description of the piece, and assorted other information about the artist and their work. The tracks on this issue's cd are really amazing, beautifully haunting music concrete crafted from the sounds of waterfalls, snatches of conversations, brief snatches of music, warm rich drones, strange chopped up soundscapes, haunting intercepted phone calls, creaking machinery, buzzing insects, chimes, crickets, short wave radio, mutated speech, footsteps, passing cars, piano, sine waves and tone generators, synthesizers, radio broadcasts and all manner of found sound.
These Philly based sonic screw ups are back with a live record (unless that's a lie and they're just fucking with us, which is very likely) that somehow manages to make all of their other releases sound tame in comparison. In the past we've described these guys as Dirty, filthy, scummy, sludgy, noisy, fractured, fucked up, damaged, demented, crusty, sloppy, shitty, sweaty, punk as fuck, fuzzy, freaked out, warped, doomy, downtuned, plodding and repetitive, and we mean all of that in the best way. Gloriously scuzzy garage rock sludge stomp, like the Buttholes crossed with the Brainbombs dosed with acid and PCP. According to the liner notes, Street Banger was recorded "Live in front of horny girls who also shriek" and it definitely sounds live. But live like recorded in an airplane hangar onto a microcassette and mastered by Merzbow. This is some sort of whitenoise freerock buzz. As blown out and in the red as any recording we have ever heard. So much so that some parts literally made our eyes water when we were listening to this on headphones. When the guitar explodes the drums DISAPPEAR completely, the vocals make everything else drop out. The bass does nothing but make a huge endless rumble that gets sucked under every drum hit and hyperdistorted riff. It's like Faxed Head but somehow even more fucked up and noisy, damaged and demented. And obviously, AWESOME!
You want to know just how dirty, filthy, scummy, sludgy, noisy, fractured, fucked up, damaged, demented, crusty, sloppy, shitty, sweaty, punk as fuck, fuzzy, freaked out, warped, doomy, downtuned, plodding and repetitive this latest tape by the Violent Students is? Well, it made short work of not ONE, but TWO different tape decks. Just sent them cowering and crying to wherever it is that broken and emasculated tape decks go. We recently discovered these Philly based dirge-scuzz caveman freenoise weirdos and were immediately smitten, well as smitten as you can be with a group of brain damaged Neanderthals beating you to death with feeding back guitars. Which in our case is VERY!! So if you need another blast of damaged Buttholes influenced drug drenched stomp and stumble, then act fast, we got a bunch of these tapes the band pressed up themselves but they won't last long.
Vlor? The name sounds like this should be some sort of obscure black metal band. Or maybe an alien race from a sci-fi TV show. But Vlor is actually a band, or project really, devoted to making lovely layered shoegazing guitar sonics in a minimal, post-rock style, a bit like Windsor For The Derby, or maybe old AQ faves Codeine (like an intro to one of their songs though, before it really kicks in with drums n' all). One guy, Brian J. Mitchell, seems to be the instigator here, playing on all the tracks, joined by various other friendly collaborating guitarists over the course of the album, including members of Remora, Aarktica, Lycia, Rivulets, and Jessica Bailiff (who also contributes some breathy vocals to the very short "Suncatcher", an anomaly on this otherwise instrumental album). Many of the tracks are trembling, mellow and quite pleasant, with some (like "Wires") getting a bit more menacing, with th' distortion factor upped... A good blend of the repetitive, experimental and the almost indie-pop, in the realm of guitar explorations. Quite Nice!
Folks went a little crazy for the Vomit Orchestra on the last list. A little surprising given the sort of distasteful monicker. But the name fit. Macabre Paradigm was a collection of sounds, meticulously arranged into a black symphony of gurgling low end, buzzing bleak ambience, damaged percussive clatter and some seriously frightening atmosphere. A gorgeous collection of miserablism and musical misanthropy for sure.
While that 2 disc set was a collection of long out of print and unreleased material, Antecrux is the newest Vomit Orchestra full length, recorded in 2006, and the two couldn't sound any different. Granted, the mood and meaning are similar, a sort of deep dark hatred and disdain for life and the living, an abstract spiritual malaise, but if anything, Antecrux is actually pretty. For the most part at least. The first two tracks are lilting minor key drifts, processed guitars that float and flutter, everything blurry and dreamlike, thick reverbed guitars unfurling jangly melancholy riffs. Sad more than depressive or hateful. From there on out it gradually gets creepier and creepier.
"Dance Ov The Sugardrugged Feary" is a wash of fuzz and static that over some strange warbly 78, a fuzzy murky twisted sort-of show tune that bursts into white noise before fading into starry sky twinkles. The next few tracks drift lazily from buzzing minimal shimmer to loping mopey slow core to glistening outerspacescape, murky reverbed tones set adrift in a jet black sky shot through with fuzzy streaks of muted hiss. Some strange electronic rhythms surface, skittering through some laid back downtempo dreaminess, before the guitar returns, emotional and melodic, insistent and intense, sounding a little like Roy Montgomery.
Antecrux culminates in the 10 minute final track "The Lotus Of Denial". That by now familiar guitar returns to meander through an expansive field of glitch and static, an army of record players, needles in the run out groove, letting loose clouds of clicks and pops into the black night sky, far below lurks an ominous field of low end rumble, the whole thing incredibly creepy and evocative. A gloriously record-crackled minor key slow core coda that is both lovely and mysteriously sorrowful. Much like the rest of Antecrux...
2006 was a banner year for amazing Tropicalia reissues. Records by the likes of Som Imaginario, Alceu Valenca & Gerardo Azevedo, Marconi Notaro, Luis Eca, Rubinho e Mauro Assumpcao and Paulo Bagunca kept us feeling warm and fuzzy all year long. Discos Mariposa has become the label to turn to for amazing long lost Tropicalia as as they were the ones responsible for many of our favorite Brazilian reissues from the last year. It looks like 2007 may offer another exciting slew of Tropicalia rediscoveries for us as we began the year getting to know the music of Ronnie Von. A star of song and the small screen in Brazil for the last four decades, Von made his first television appearance in 1965 on the TV show the Brazilian Beatles Club. Von would perform live on various variety shows and cut records that sold quite well. His show The Small World Of Ronnie Von helped give a wider audience and launch careers for folks like Os Mutantes, Martinha and Gal Costa. But beyond just having such good taste, his own music is so so delightful. His vocals are so effortless and breezy. You can't help but wish you were soaking in the sun and daydreaming the afternoon away when you hear the songs on this collection. He's been backed by members of Os Mutantes and even collaborated with Caetano Veloso. Even after being struck by polio he's fought off illness and continues to be a staple of Brazilian television, the big screen and now more of us finally get to hear his great sounds!
NYC's White Hills blew us away last year with a bunch of limited edition, Julian Cope-approved cd-r releases documenting their mesmeric, motorik, heavy, and very Hawkwindy space rock sound. We're now very pleased to have their new full-length album in stock -- and it's a real cd, even though the (cool-looking) digipack it's contained within appears hand-assembled.
This time around, we are initially given the impression that White Hills has decided to mix it up a little, branching off into a more musicianly, refined post-rock realm rather than sticking entirely to the amplification n' effects laden, cosmic droneout krautrockishness set-the-controls ROCK of their cd-rs. Certainly there's more dynamics here, more ambient/acoustic interludes, lots of really pretty, even poppy bits. But what about the heavy hypnotic headnodders? They're here too, don't worry! Fans of Hawkwind, Neu!, Braindonor, Spacemen Three, Comets On Fire, Kinski, Titan, Pharaoh Overlord, etc. will certainly dig the likes of "Love Serve Remember" (which weirdly reminds us of the Painteens) and the distorted, psychedelic, jamming excess of the nearly 15 minute long album-closing title track, among others here. This new White Hills is perhaps more nuanced in some ways than their prior output, but any newfound delicacy hasn't dimmed the drugged dementia of the louder portions of this disc and they've always had their wonderfully blissful side anyway, so we're quite happy with their "progress"!
They may be thousands of miles apart, but it would take more than something like distance to keep these two forces of musical darkness from meeting and unleashing this Black Plague. AQ faves, Australian noise rockers the Grey Daturas, were visited recently by the US ambassadors of noise, Wolf Eyes. Never one to squander an opportunity to get together and kick up a ruckus, the Daturas dragged the Eyes into the studio, and both bands spent a few hours cooking up their own unique vision of sonic decay. Wolf Eyes came up with the 5 part "Post Civilization Muzak", 24 minutes of grrrrrrrrrrrinding post industrial brutality. Huge sheets of coruscating electronics, super distorted guitar, and wild streaks of white hot feedback, all tangled up into a blazing blood red supernova of sound.
The Grey Daturas counter with some musical density of their own. A bit more lo-fi, three long tracks, one a tangled freejazz grind psychnoise splatter, a blurred cloud of stuttery staggering freakout, another a slow plodding glacial sludge, with thick washes of abstract doom and simple tribal drumming and finally a full on far out post rock post punk instrumental epic, heavy and droney and massive. Pretty killer stuff.
Packaged in a glossy digipak and released on the Daturas' Heathen Skulls label. Includes a bonus Wolf Eyes track NOT included on the upcoming domestic lp version!!
We reviewed the first Wormwood record ages and ages ago. At the time we described them as sounding like " Eyehategod with keyboards, a black metal Neurosis, a nastier, less spaced-out Tarantula Hawk..." Reading that just now only reminded us just how much we dug these guys. So where the heck have they been? Well, if this new record is any indication, they've been holed up in some black cave somewhere (one equipped with a jam pad and a recording studio) getting weirder, more fucked up and even better that they were before.
Eyehategod and Neurosis are definitely huge influences, but the band has gotten even slower and dirgier, and it definitely suits them. Take EHG and Neurosis, but toss some Corrupted, some Asunder, even some Isis into the mix, and you'll be getting close. But then there's keyboards, ALL OVER THE PLACE. And they're not subtle or minimal, they're just not used for ambience, they are psychedelic and proggy and give the proceedings a definite psychprog black metal vibe. Weird. But so cool. Take some super heavy, murky crusty epic metal, howled vocals, wild drumming, bombastic and ultra pummeling, then add in the keyboards, break it down every once in a while into some super tripped out psychedelic passages, where the keyboards hit prog overload and the drums get all tribal. Sort of Neurosis meets Cradle Of Filth? Whatever it is it's cool.
But the second lp is where stuff gets really good. Side three is almost entirely taken up by "No True Altruism", an epic dirge of haunted house cinematic doom, or something, it sounds like Corrupted channelled through Goblin, slow and lumbering with bursts of sludgy pummel, blasts of double kick drumming, grinding overblown bass, absolute horror movie prog sludge nirvana.
Side 4 is all a single track, a mind blowing coda to a record that was already pretty brain melting, "Gluttony" is a massive chaotic dubbed out whirl of what-the-fuck sonics and processed sludge weirdness. It sounds like a remix, sort of, with huge walls of backwards guitars, garbled backwards vocals, weird processed rhythms, bits of Terminal Cheesecake, Butthole Surfers all whipped into a maelstrom of Corrupted meets Teenage Filmstars sonic fuckery, but still murky and muddy and impossibly doomy. Wow.
There will be a cd release of this eventually, but it definitely sounds like it was made to be a double lp, with disc one being the more black psych sludge rock, the second disc the sludgey tripped out doom. Either way, awesome!
Packaged in a killer, super thick gatefold sleeve, with creepy cool artwork and lyrics and liner notes inside. LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, each copy hand numbered!
Another one of those 'it had to happen' matchups. New Zealand's inimitable Campbell Kneale aka Birchville Cat Motel and the formerly Bay Area now PDX based noiserock dynamic duo The Yellow Swans. As we're huge fans of both of these outfits, it would take a pretty serious fumble to disappoint, and we're happy to report that this is anything but.
Two massively thick snarls of corrosive fuzz and buzz. This is some serious noise for sure. But as a testament to the skill at work here, this noise is imbued with all sorts of melody and color, for every harsh streak of blown out amp melting feedback, there is a delicate burbling melody, for every wall of skull crushing synth damage, there is a a smooth drifting smear of glistening shimmer. It's ugly on the outside, sure, but like your mom always told you, beauty is only skin deep, and just below the blistering scaly monster skin of these two bursts of furious amp damage, is all manner of loveliness, subtle tonal shifts, gloriously rich overtones constantly swirling and blurring together, it's a little like some Sunroof! wrapped in bit of Merzbow, or a dense swirl of Growing all wrapped up tight within a crunchy Masonna shell.
Sure sounds good to us...
Another killer fuzzy foggy blast of noisy beauty from these Portland based ex Bay area noisemakers, captured on the practically obsolete and thus still uber hip cassette tape format. We only got 20, so only the truly quick on the trigger (and by trigger we of course mean 'buy' button) will be claiming these as their own, so get that clicker finger all limbered up.
This latest missive, hear titled DAMNED Yellow Swans (in keeping with the always different D-word) find the band in almost ambient territory. Not that they were ever that far from ambientland anyway, but here the 'Swans unfurl massive slow shifting clouds of sonic steel wool. Grey and black and itchy and scratchy, prickly but with all the thorns dulled, so instead of pricking and drawing blood, these whirls of swirling sound just sort of wrap themselves around your ears and poke and prod, shimmy and shake, wrapping you in layer after layer of thick, dense reverberating foggy fuzz. Hand made sleeves and hand painted tapes. So limited, if you blink your eyes they'll be gone.
One of the more refreshing Ninja Tune outings in quite a while. Yppah is the work of Joe Corrales, a young man from Texas, who like many in his generation, has come of age at a time where shoegaze guitars and emotive laptops have found a special place in his heart. He's found a way to bring those influences together as he integrates his guitar playing through massive delays into the mix of the nice electronica he creates which most definitely recalls the honey soaked nostalgia of early Four Tet. Cinematic and wide eyed, it's also easy to start hearing how the latest M83 might have sounded without vocals or what Tristeza would sound like if they leaned away from post-rock and more towards electronica. Quite nice.
